The Tories can’t even copy the Government right.

Huh, turns out the rest of the world aren’t stupid. And when George Osbourne and David Cameron come out of a meeting with the Chancellor Alistair Darling, and suddenly do a U-Turn on their position over the economy and declare that state intervention is the only possible option for the government to take, the rest of the world notices this, sees it for what it is and realises the government must be planning a serious bail-out plan for our ailing banks.

Obviously they realise this means the economy is truly suffering and panic, selling lots of shares, creating more turmoil economically and shredding the value of our biggest banks in the process.

The Tories, after being chastised by Darling for offering a ‘running commentary’ have insisted they were not even partly to blame, as Ned Temko notes, but Jesus how stupid do you have to be to come out of a confidential meeting and take on what the government are secretly planning and claim it as your own plan to try look clever in front of the electorate?

Growth slows to a halt…bugger.

My cynical post about the so-called ‘experts’ would probably look a lot more cutting today if it didn’t turn out that our economy is now at zero growth. Damn!

Though I would point out that one idiot said ‘it’s clear we’re already in a recession’. Given that a recession is two quarters of negative growth, and the past couple of months have been zero growth and before that slow growth, it’s technically impossible that we’re in a recession, even if we’re in the middle of mild negative growth.

This bandying around of the term recession is a sort of self-feeding paranoia and fear though, as some people use it in a technical sense and others to describe any sort of negative growth. The media don’t always differentiate between the two as they should and give equal airtime to both types of phrase. To the person ‘on the street’ who doesn’t have time to work out what it all means, it’s basically double the negativity, which helps the whole thing becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as people respond by spending less, fuelling the slow down in growth.

Not that I have any solutions though.

Make up your bloody mind economists!

Gah! One month, you get an article hoping something happens, then when it does happen, the same publication or website will produce an article lamenting the occurence. Today the BBC has posted an article about how the pound is losing value.

Which sounds bad, but I’ve spent the last few months quite happy for the pound to lose value so that our export industry can thrive and pick up some of the slack currently being experienced in our economy. The reason? The BBC said so!

I’ll be honest and admit I can’t find said article, mainly because the search facility on the BBC is so shockingly bad. Plus it may have been a news report.

Anyway, the wider point I’m making is that it’s frustrating never knowing quite what to believe when it comes to the economy. For instance, we’re having all these horror stories about the jobless figures rising, and I’m sure it’s really hard for the people who’ve sadly lost their jobs, but when you read the stories you see that actually the figures have merely risen to where they were last year, and actually we have the second highest number of people in work since records began, after a further 20,000 people found work.

That doesn’t sound nearly as bad, but it therefore doesn’t make good copy and gets buried down in the detail, leaving the public with a general impression that our economy, society and whole world is melting.

Inflationary Worries

I wrote this post back when inflation jumped from 2.5% to 3%. For some reason it has languished in my draft folder since then, I think because I wanted a big list of ways we could save money during this period, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered as there are similar lists in every magazine at the moment so it felt kinda futile. However the wider points in the post I like so here it is:

Consumer confidence hits new lows as we all shop…more.

One of those classic articles on the BBC today, where figures are released going against everything the media keep telling us, so they’re couched in the most negative terms possible.

‘How to avoid the gloom’ - Don’t read anything for the next two years.

No sooner had I posted about excitable facts and figures from the media than the Times writes breathlessly about the predictions from JPMorgans of 40,000 job losses in the city. They claim the figures are a ‘hammer blow’ to the government. Really? A ‘hammer blow’ on the same day we find out a near identical number of people found work in the last month? So basically, this hammer blow would consist of the same amount of people losing their jobs as people gaining jobs in the last three months, leaving us roughly where we started at the end of 2007.

Facts and Figures in the face of economic downturn

I’m currently keeping an eye on the gloomy prediction figures that seem to be trotted out on a daily basis, as I’m fairly sure 90% of them are complete tripe.